Some Boulder residents experienced murky, cloudy water coming out of their taps late Monday night, but after twice flushing the city's water system overnight, officials said Tuesday that the water should be clear moving forward.

The cloudiness some residents experienced in their water Monday night was calcium, which gets added to city water at the end of the treatment process, officials said.

Crews were doing some prep work in advance of construction at the Betasso Water Treatment Facility that stirred up excess calcium at the bottom of a water storage tank, according to Ben Irwin, a spokesman for the Boulder Public Works Department.

The project at the Betasso Water Treatment Facility, which involves routine maintenance and replacement work, will continue for the next year to 18 months.

"I'm told they were moving water around in the water storage tanks at the end of the treatment process where the calcium additive is added to be able to start to look at some of the structural elements supporting those tanks and looking to start working on that aspect of the project," city spokesman Ben Irwin said.

After receiving dozens of phone calls and emails Monday evening, city crews began working to flush the excess calcium from the water supply. By Tuesday morning, city officials were seeing clear water in the main distribution center, Irwin said.

Some people continued to see cloudy water coming from their taps on Tuesday, which Irwin said likely came from pockets in the main network that didn't get flushed completely.

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Crews responded to those neighborhoods to do more localized flushing on Tuesday.

Irwin said people should not be concerned if they ingested the cloudy water. City officials were monitoring the water overnight and found that treatment and disinfectant levels stayed within the standard range.

Irwin said he did not believe the cloudy water would impact people's in-home water equipment such as hot-water heaters. He said he was still trying to gather information about how the city communicated the cloudiness issue to residents.

City officials sent a news release to local media at 10:15 p.m. Monday reporting the issues with the water system.

"We didn't start receiving reports of this until early evening and so that's really when we first started learning about it," Irwin said. "And (because of) the nature of how water distributes across the city, the scope of it wasn't immediately apparent, either.

"In this case, we were very much dependent on people reporting it to understand the scope of what was going on."

Twice a year, when the city switches water sources, officials send out information letting some residents know that they might notice a slight change in the taste of their drinking water.

Irwin said the city will continue to send out alerts when the city changes water sources over the next year. He said that may occur more frequently during the construction at Betasso.

Boulder resident Dan Condon, who lives north of downtown on Broadway, said he noticed the cloudiness around 7 p.m. Monday. Condon described the water as slightly discolored with what appeared to be some grit in it.

"I was filling up a bottle and I was like, 'Wow this looks nasty,'" he said.

He brushed his teeth using bottled water Monday night, but said Tuesday morning that the water in his home seemed to have cleared up.

He would have liked the city to send out an alert anticipating the problem, he said.

"Honestly, I feel like with the raised presence of the Flint crisis, having grown up in Milwaukee during the Cryptosporidium crisis, I would expect that they would've anticipated anything that could've occurred through whatever they were doing that caused the sediment to kick up," he said. "It's a wise decision to anticipate rather than explain and apologize."

Condon is referring to Flint, Mich., where the drinking water was contaminated with lead starting in 2014. He's also referring to a 1993 waterborne disease outbreak in Milwaukee.

Bob Porath, who lives on the north end of Martin Acres, noticed murky water in his home Monday night. He said he called the city then and got a call back this morning.

He, too, said he wished the city had found a way to notify residents.

"It's a serious enough thing that you'd like to be able to have some sort of alert that it was happening," he said. "Though it sounded like they were still trying to track it themselves."

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